The Wilson's on quality in quantum chemistry

Ken Wilson is very well known for developing the renormalisation group and applying it to critical phenomena and the Kondo problem. There is a long and interesting (but somewhat meandering) interview with him about his career. Amongst various choice tid-bits there is the exchange below about his father, E. Bright Wilson, a pioneer in quantum chemistry.

PoS

Did your father use computers? Did you know of his models for getting infrared spectra? Did things like that play a role in your thinking?

KGW

What I remember from discussions with my father was that he used get very wrought up about computational quantum chemists. Garbage in, garbage out. That set me up to spend some time at Ohio State studying quantum chemistry. I had done a little bit towards the end of my stay at Cornell, but took it more seriously while I was at Ohio State. And so then I had to find out from my father who were the good people. And he knew them, he had a list of them.

PoS

And who did he say were the good people?

KGW

There was [Isiah] Shavit. There was Ernie Davidson, John Pople from Carnegie Mellon. What's interesting about this is that later when I became interested in the history of physics and [Thomas S.] Kuhn's book, one of the characteristics of the pre-paradigm phase he discusses, and there really are pre-paradigm phases --you know, people don't want to admit that--is that everybody is arguing with each other and somebody comes in from outside and tries to figure out what's going on, like my father interacting with the quantum chemists, they learn who the good people are. And yet, they won't admit that there are good people, unless you ask them, otherwise they are more interested in complaining about the poor quality of the research by others in the field....

PoS

And the criterion for being good? I mean what makes a person good?

KGW

These are the people who are smart, take serious problems to work on...

PoS

The generative quality comes in?

KGW

For instance, consider quantum chemistry for a moment. What I found was that the people who did the important work worked on algorithms. They improved the algorithms for solving quantum chemistry problems on computers. They couldn't do the calculations they wanted to do, so they worked on algorithms. And it was the algorithmic work that was absolutely essential. When the computers got better, and they could do serious things, it was the work on algorithms that made the difference and the people that my father knew made contributions to serious algorithm developments. At the same time, there was just a lot of stuff published where people were running programs and they were paying no attention to whether they worked or didn't work, and claiming all sorts of fancy things.